Explore our online annual report for interviews, key facts and figures on digital television switchover in the year to 31 March 2010

The important thing about switchover is that although it’s a national programme, it looks like a local programme to the viewer. It only affects you when your transmitter or your television region switches over. We decided that from the outset the best way to communicate this would be to put a local and regional focus on everything that we do. To that end we’ve recruited five regional teams in the first few months; I think we’ve now got seven regional teams. We’ve already seen five of those television regions switch over; Wales is the first digital nation. In each and every case, the spearheading of local publicity and representation has been by Digital UK’s regional manager and his or her team.

Most people get through switchover really very easily but a minority of people are potentially vulnerable, they do need an extra little bit of help. There is a Help Scheme for those who are 75 or over or on a range of disability benefits but that doesn’t cover everyone and the special contribution made by our partnership with the charities is to bridge the gap between the Switchover Help Scheme and the wider community. So what does it do? It provides a little bit of extra information and advice. That might be in the form of public meetings, drop-ins or advice points; it provides a little bit of re-assurance. From time to time it might even provide an extra little bit of practical help as well. But this is where the charities make the difference.

I think there’s an awful lot to learn from the way that we’ve delivered a national programme locally. By community outreach we’ve taken many more people with us through the switchover process than we would have done if we’d tried to do it all from the centre; in rather, an effective but perhaps sometimes impersonal campaign, of advertising and leaflets. The benefits of this are most obviously shown by the work of the charities. Nobody does it better than the charities, nobody reaches deeper into the local communities than the charities and as I look ahead, I can see other campaigns to come, perhaps and most obviously one like digital inclusion, the desire to see many more people benefiting from participation and use of the internet; I can see campaigns like that benefiting enormously from local engagement by local charities, local staff and local volunteers.